My Emacs Setup, pt 2: packages

Published 2013-06-17 @ 12:00

OK… So this one I just figured out this week and have finally ironed
out a lot of the wrinkles that was making me sour on elpa and el-get.
I’m still sour on el-get. The damn thing is way too complex, poorly
documented, and does too much. elpa (aka packages.el) does a much
better job of doing one thing.

packages.el isn’t without its faults. I’ve found a number of
functions that I’ve needed to be missing. I’ve added them and proposed
them to the author so we’ll see how that goes.

Let’s dig in. This file is not loaded via autoload so that I can
control exactly when it gets executed.

rwd-package-manifest lets me declare all my packages in a clean
list, and ensures that any packages removed from the manifest are
removed on the next run. This lets me keep all my packages under
version control and spinning up a new login just consists of bringing
up emacs and waiting for the installs to occur.